


A Boy

by TriplePirouette



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-10
Updated: 2012-09-10
Packaged: 2017-11-13 23:39:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/509018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TriplePirouette/pseuds/TriplePirouette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once Upon a Time, there was a boy. Lost and afraid, he wandered a world where no magic existed, searching for a way back to his father.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Boy

**Author's Note:**

> This is all Kelly/ddagent's fault. One second we were talking about canon!Jefferson vs. fannon!Jefferson and the next I was writing this. I don't really even know what this is, but of all the ideas I hear floating around, I hadn't heard this one, and I think it has some interesting possibilities. Also- I have NO idea if there's ANY canon at all to support this. I don't know eye color, I don't know if time lines line up... it's JUST a fun idea.

Once Upon a Time, there was a boy. Lost and afraid, he wandered a world where no magic existed, searching for a way back to his father. He stumbled down streets and alleys, ate from the trash, and became a deft pick pocket when he needed to be.

 

Though his father was a man who made mistakes, he was a man with a good heart, and the boy had only been trying to save him from himself. The boy searched for years in tiny magic shops and in dark corners of places he'd never heard before for a way back to his home, to the man who needed him. He found himself in the homes of women who called themselves witches and in the meetings of men who called themselves mages.

 

None, none had the real power.

 

He'd grown tired, and weary, and one day stumbled upon a sign touting that its owner was looking for an apprentice. He walked into the milliner's shop, thin and dirty, and asked if the man would take him on. The old man looked him over carefully and with a smile assented. He even gave him a room in the back of his shop. It was small, but the cot was better than the boy had in years.

 

The old man paid him little, but put a roof over his head and food in his stomach and slowly taught him the art of hat making. He taught him about sizes and shapes and how to hide his stitches, he taught him about color and fashion and how to wear a hat with a jaunty tip to it.

 

After three years, the man declared he could teach the boy no more, and pulled out an old wooden box after the store closed one day. He opened it, revealing only a folded length of dusty black cloth. “I used to believe in magic when I was a boy,” the old man said, holding the box out to him. “One of my first customers was an old woman who didn't have much, but wanted a hat for her son to wear when he went to war. She gave me this cloth, said she's had it blessed and that it contained luck and good fortune. From it I made the boy a hat.” The old man sighed, it was deep and heavy and full of a lifetime of pain and regret. “He was the only one is his battalion to make it home alive.”

 

The old man handed him the box. “Baelfire, I don't have much left, and there's no place in this world anymore for a milliner's shop, so leaving this failing business to you in a few months when I retire wouldn't do much, I'm afraid. What I can do, is give this to you, and hope, hope that you can do something with what I've given you.”

 

Bae stared at the crumbling old man, who seemed to live more out of sheer will than anything, and nodded with a small smile. He put his hands on the box and knew, knew by the way his fingertips tingled, that this cloth did contain real magic. “Thank you, Mr. Jefferson.”

 

“What does it tell you to make, boy?” Mr. Jefferson asked, staring at Bae as his eyes widened with the power in his hands.

 

Bae's voice shuttered out of him. “A top hat. It tells me it needs to be a top hat.”

 

Mr. Jefferson smiled, more gums than teeth, and handed the boy a long, curved needled. “Then what are you waiting for?”

 

For three days he sewed. With each stitch he thought of his home, he thought of the world he wanted to be back in, he thought of finding a way to return, he thought of his father. When he was finished, he put the hat on his head, closed his eyes, and wished.

 

Nothing happened.

 

For a month it sat in the back of the shop. Every night, Bae put it on and _wished._ He could feel the magic coursing though the hat, he just didn't know how to use it... or if he even could.

 

He tossed it to the floor in frustration one night. The hat spun on edge.

 

It didn't stop. Like a horrible nightmare fueled by his past, it opened a vortex in the floor, spinning until he leaned in, too curious not to look, and fell.

 

It took him nearly a decade to work out all the doors, all the tricks, and all the secrets. He went to kingdoms beyond imagination and realms that were simple and plain. He saw magic and war. He saw love... and he saw loss.

 

He took jobs ferrying people from place to place- trips for fun, trips for business, trips as side show magic- to keep silver in his pocket and food in his belly.

 

He fell in love.

 

By the time Baelfire found the world he had come from, he no longer went by that name. He'd long ago taken to calling himself Jefferson, in honor of the milliner who'd given him the fabric for the hat. He didn't know how many years had passed, each door was different in that respect and there was no way to really keep track of time jumping from place to place, but he knew the power of a name.

 

When he finally went home he found the name Rumpelstiltskin was far more powerful than he'd ever imagined.

 

Baelfire was cautious when he first returned. He became the man with the hat box, the man the Queen went to when she needed a trip here or there. In exchange, he asked for tales of the fabled Dark One, and found that almost three hundred years had passed him by. He asked to be present one day, in exchange for one trip, when the Dark One was called. He saw a monster far from the father he knew, satisfied only by deals and dark magic, talking of a horrible curse that would befall everyone.

 

The man he saw was not the father he'd lost.

 

Jefferson slipped away the next night, as far from the court as he could get himself and his wife. He buried the hat in a trunk in his new home, an escape plan he prayed he never would need to use, and tried to forget that magic ever existed. There was a price for all magic, and it seemed his father had paid a dear one. With a child on the way, he didn't care to pay anything at all. Not anymore.

 

He knew the Queen would find him one day, he knew that he'd even have to deal with his father at some point, but he could wait for those things. He could at least try to be happy now. There was no sacrificing anything for his father now- he was more monster and magic than man- so he would stay Jefferson, and the name that he was born with would fade away.

 

He was going to be a father himself, and he was going to be a better father than his own: the father that knew how important family was, the father that would do anything for his child, the father that would watch the world burn for his baby.

 

Once upon a time, there was a boy who became a father. Afraid for his daughter, he realized he would do anything for her. He would do stupid, dangerous things to see her happy and safe. As he sat in Wonderland sewing non-magical hats from non-magical fabric, he realized what he'd never seen before: he was just like his own father.

 

 


End file.
